Tuesday, June 27, 2017

+David McGrogan’s Yoon-Suin is a southeast-Asian inspired
build-your-own campaign setting with more tables than an IKEA. It is a campaign supplement of a very specific sort, enough so that I can't think of any others in the category.

Yoon-Suin is adaptable: it
could be used on its own, in whole or only in parts, but it could
also be thrown down in nearly any other D&D campaign without any
great change at all: A mysterious ship has arrived in a nearby port,
bearing exotic goods from an isolated, faraway land. Apply a hook as
needed and the players are off to be strangers in a strange land.

The
book itself is split into different chapters by region, plus a
bestiary and appendixes. Each chapter is, rather than maps and lore
and Important Personages™, filled with tables for DMs to construct
a campaign. There are things that are always true about Yoon-Suin
(the castes, the broad details of each region, the importance of
tea), but near everything else is up to the dice.

The
Yoon-Suin tables cover the width and breadth of things DMs might
need: there are tables for factions, locations, lairs, NPCs, plot
hooks, rumors, hirelings, poisons, treasure, drugs, teas, and things
that are none of the above. Some of these tables are shared between
regions, while others are unique to a specific location – Cockroach
clans are native to the Yellow City, dwarf fortresses come into play
only in the mountains of the moon, brothels can be found anywhere.

The
introduction of randomly-generated social spheres for the party is
probably my favorite part of the tablery in the book. It’s a matter
of five minutes to make some rolls and start drawing connections
between them.

“We’ve
got a criminal band whose second-in-command is involved in adultery
and the whole bunch is warring against another group. Then we’ve
got a club-fighting troupe whose head trainer is doing something
immensely foolish and thieves raided their treasury...”

The
stories knit themselves together with minimal elbow grease, which is
absolutely worth a gold star.

All of these tables provide ample material for modification as one sees fit (I’ve
got a friend who would use them to make a weird Korea in a
heartbeat), or just serve as a model if one wants to work on
something of their own.

It
is important to remember that this book provides the sandbox, not the
castle. Someone looking for complex lore or pre-made epic quests in Yoon-Suin will
probably find themselves a bit disappointed. People who love tables
and fiddly bits have far, far worse choices they can make.

Monday, June 26, 2017

(This was brought on by reading through the excellent Book of Creatures and its entry on the Bakunawa of Philippine myth)

The world
used to have seven moons. This is common knowledge among anyone who has studied
astronomy, and can occasionally be stumbled across in folk tales, children’s
games, and nursery rhymes. Among average folk it would be equivalent to
knowledge of non-Pluto trans-Neptunian objects.

There’s only
one moon now. Here’s how the story would be told:

Long ago,
but not so long ago that men and gods do not remember, the great gray serpent
Bakunawa lived in the eastern ocean.In
those days there were seven moons, as brilliant and beautiful as gems on a
velvet cloth, and Bakunawa rose from the sea each night to watch them pass over
his head; He loved beauty and beautiful things. Each night, he loved the moons
a little more, and in time it came to be that he loved the moons so much that
he wanted them for his own.

On a summer
night, when the air was still and the Folk played with the lightning bugs and
the moons were bright and full, Bakunawa rose up from the depths and flew up into
the sky. He flew higher and higher and grew bigger and bigger until he soared
above the sky and could be seen by the whole world like a silvery ribbon. He
opened up his great whiskered mouth and GULP! He gobbled up the first
moon.

The people
below saw all this, and were frightened. They rushed out of their homes into
the streets and fields, shouting and stamping their feet and banging on pots
and pans, trying to scare Bakunawa away. But the great gray serpent did not
hear them down on the ground, and gobbled up the second moon, and right
thereafter the third.

The people
cried out to the gods, saying “the great Bakunawa is eating the moons one by
one and we cannot scare him away! Come to our aid, O gods of man!”

The gods
heard the pleas of the people, and a great number answered them. The gods went
forth above the sky to deal with Bakunawa, but by the time they arrived, the
great gray serpent had eaten all but one of the moons!

The gods did
battle Bakunawa then, and they fought through the night. No matter how hard he
was struck, he would not spit out the moons. But he was so full from his meal
that he could not fight the gods off. Bakunawa was chased out of the sky and
back into the depths of the ocean, so deep that the gods could not follow him.
There in the darkness he coiled around himself and fell asleep. He sleeps there
still, dreaming of the moon that escaped him.

If you ever
see his shadow come forth a-gobbling, run out into the streets and shout and
stamp your feet and call on the gods to scare his shadow away.

The First
Moon (Gold) – A city-world of kings and crowns. Its mummified inhabitants
know the true secret of Royalty.

The
Second Moon (Mahogany) – A puzzle box of a trillion wooden pieces all
shifting and locking and turning about in a constant computational dance.

The Third
Moon (Porcelain) – A most beautiful orchid-world of purest white. Rivers of
blue and red form traceries on its tectonic petals. The prisoners are too tall
and too sharp by half, and their hands are like knives.

The Fifth
Moon (Blood) – The sunward side is a scabrous slurry, the nightward is
jagged spikes of flash-frozen ichor. Leukocytic colony mats bob atop the ocean,
sailed by proboscis’d natives.

The Sixth
Moon (Blue) – A world oflapis lazuli monadnocks, migrating sapphire
dunes, methane thunderheads. Its inhabitants were nomads, each tribe chasing a
beast it would never catch.

The Last
Moon (Gravedust) – A gray tomb, scarred and broken from the battle between
Bakunawa and the gods. Bears a massive, twisting wound across its daylight
side. Empty moon beast hive-cities cling to crater rims. The ulfire towers of the
New Gods spread slowly across its airless surface.

Visiting
the Moon

Currently,
the only way to visit the moon is by taking the ship Diamondwing out of
Meredat. The ship’s captain, the archmage Balathrysti, is an agreeable but
utterly barmy fellow (not particularly surprising, considering he is both a
wizard and a natural philosopher) and is willing to take passengers to and from
the Moon for a reasonable fee of magical items and spellbooks.

It takes 1d4
days to reach the moon via the Diamondwing (one must take into account
the solar winds, radiation currents, perigee/apogee and astral parasite
migration patterns). As it is safest to land on the moon when it is full, the Diamondwing
will depart an appropriate number of days before the full moon, with its
cargo of magical supplies and pilgrims.

Descent
takes less than a day, as falling down a gravity well is relatively easy.

Moonshadows

Time and
space being what they are, the six prior moons are not completely gone.
Physically they rest in Bakunawa’s stomach, but metaphysically they still cast
shadows upon their old orbits. They phase in and out of entanglement on their
own, seeming to replace the Gravedust Moon but rarely appearing for more than a
few minutes at a time. A high-level wizard sufficiently trained in quantum
metaphysics could potentially anchor one of the six devoured moons in place
long enough for the Diamondwing to land upon it.

Moon-Deniers

There is a
school of conspiracy that claims that, not only have wizards never gone to the
moon, but that there has only ever been one moon at all and Bakunawa does not
exist. Their primary argumentative points (as found in their literature)
include:

Wizards, being wizards and thus not
caring for things like ethics, would have no compunction about lying to
the masses to inflate their ego.

Woodcuts of wizards on the moon can
easily be faked.

The gods use it as a cover story to
hide the horrible truth of their grand murder-orgy.

The entire hoax is just projected
illusions by the New God Order, which lives on the moon.

Bakunalings

Spawn of
Bakunawa will occasionally rise to the surface, to terrorize coastal villages
on the eastern sea. These spawn are of animal intelligence, and act so out of
hunger or curiosity.

Bakunalings
are found in groups of 1d6, and are equivalent to a dragon wyrmling. Instead of
a breath weapon, they may swallow an individual whole (Player may avoid on a
successful save). Those swallowed by their starless inner void take existential
crisis damage every turn. Killing a bakunaling will allow the unfortunate
individual to be cut out of its stomach and rescued.

The
Serpent Itself

If Bakunawa
were to wake, he would rise from his abyssal home and make way towards the
moon. Upon emerging from the water, he would be equivalent to an ancient dragon
with a swallow attack. Those swallowed will feel even greater existential
dread, and take damage accordingly.

Bakunawa
will most likely ignore attacks and head onwards to the sky. If critically
injured, he might turn his attention to anyone attempting to stop him.

After five
turns, Bakunawa will double its Hit Dice and size. This will repeat every 5
turns / 30 seconds, until he has reached proper moon-devouring size.

Wednesday, June 21, 2017

Born
Vircir Inotem Tolius Xenvi, he ascended to the throne at the age of
17 upon deposing of his impotent and opium-addled father. The body of
Tolius III had barely stopped swinging from the Bridge of Crowns when
Tolius IV became Darvatius I, and he made his goal known to his
people: to be the greatest emperor the world would ever know.

He
would succeed.

The
guard was changed immediately. His father’s bootlickers were
removed swiftly and quietly, the ancient invertebrates replaced by a
new circle of advisers. Fresh faces arrived in the capital; Younger
men with sharper minds, pulled in with a broader net than the old
order: Radical philosophers, heterodox military minds, mages returned
from exile, apocalyptic clerics, anyone who might be of use.

Darvatius’s
main support was among the lower classes and military, a base he had
built since he first entered the public eye as a prince. He played to
the fears and desires of those who had lost the most under his
father’s haphazard policies, to great success. Offer a working man
enough coin to keep his children alive and he will follow to the ends
of the earth. Besides this, he was new, driven, and respectable in
ways his brothers and father were not. His was the largest faction,
but still an overall minority: If any of the major noble factions
banded together he would be finished.

The
executions followed. Anyone among the aristocracy who would have
supported his older brothers was murdered swiftly and without
question before they could organize against him. Midnight raids and
public deaths threw rival factions into disarray. To this day, cities
in what were the empires core territories still possess a major
causeway named Crucifixion Street.

For
a time, the empire ran red. Peasant uprisings, military coups,
assassinations, a foaming chaos with Darvatius at the helm.

His
brothers he spared from death, for reasons never adequately explained
by historians or propagandists, though he left them both lobotomized
eunuchs.

The
older of the two, Heiron, was stationed at the Rock of Ienila as
keeper of the lighthouse. He was the smarter and stronger of the two,
but was more fit as a poet and harpist than as a king. By secret arts
he remains at Ienila to this day, and sailors who trawl the route
past the Rock often claim to hear his distant songs on clear nights.

The
younger brother, Vanirem, was a reprehensible scab of a man, and was
given to the care of a particular sorcerer of the court, with the
instructions that “he is to be cared for, and his desires met”.

Vanirem
died less than two years later in a disease-ridden villa outside the
capital. His corpse was found with vaults filled with obscene,
obscure erotica (worth a fortune for deviants with disposable
income), a harem of twenty-one succubi (the bindings on which were
never loosened), and a twelve-foot prehensile cock.

A
year passed, and another, and the violence faded. Any significant
threat posed to Darvatius was dead or exiled, and the government was
filled with his supporters, promoted up from his troops and low-born
loyalists. Stability was restored, and the empire seemed, for the
first time in years, to be moving somewhere that wasn’t total
destruction.

"Imperial Immortal", also by Alexeev

The
wars, naturally, came next. For four and a half decades, there was no
peace at all, and the empire flourished. Darvatius’ army went out
and conquered all the eye might see or the mind might imagine.

To
the north, he brought the squabbling barbarian clans to heel, paved
over their burial mounds with roads and put their children in his
schools. In the south, he drained a swampy sea for farmland, cut down
the plague forests, and smashed the Schixold priesthood on the steps
of their ziggurats. To the west he built the Golden Cities atop the
wreckage of the mage kingdoms of Tarn Bornem. In the east he toppled
the Kingfisher and united the Mead-Halls of the Flowered Hills. At
home, he struck where needed to keep his nobles in line. Campaign
after campaign, conquest after conquest. Cities sprung up from the
earth, monuments rose like forests. The sword of civilization cut
through the fabric of the world.

The
Folk withdrew to the wild places in those years, and Darvatius did
not pursue them; So long as they remained neutral, he had no need to
waste men and money in the attempt. The gods too he held to this
agreement. Toleration, so long as they remained distant. His focus
was on the murder of men.

A
dreadful day drew near, and then arrived like some horrible, yawning
gulf, eating up the dawn.

The
last free sovereign was the Golden Goddess of Pa-O Pa-O: a perfectly
ordinary six-year-old girl without a touch of magic, from a tiny
island in the furthest south-west. When the legionnaires landed on
the white shores of Pa-O Pa-O, she greeted them with the sun-yellow
flowers she had picked from the volcano slopes, thinking that they
were just more pilgrims come to visit. She loved visitors.

The
beaches of Pa-O Pa-O are no longer white, the water no longer clear,
the trees no longer tall, and the flowers have gone away. The great
stone heads of Goddesses past are silent, their faces stained by the
shit of ragged black seagulls. Of the girl, the few that remain on
the island now believe that, after signing over her nation on a
treaty she couldn’t understand, she went back to her mother and
lived out the rest of her days in peaceful obscurity.

They
believe, though they know it is certainly not true.

At
last, peace. There was peace, silent and terrible. The legions
marched home. The wars were over, for there was no one else to war
against in all the known world – the peoples of each land from
horizon to horizon knew the rule of Darvatius. They spoke his
language, paid his taxes, followed his laws.

And
in a moment, the animus that had driven Darvatius and his empire
evaporated. The mighty emperor, king of the world, was brought low by
a power he had not conquered – existential crisis. He returned to
his glorious capital in troubled triumph, and the celebrations of the
world’s conquering continued for months without him. Darvatius
retired to his palace, and the guards whispered of his wordless
pacing of the columned halls or lonely sitting upon his marble
throne.

Just
before dawn, on the day of his final triumphal parade, he saddled his
horse and rode out of the city.

And
he began the war anew.

Darvatius
raised a new army – from where, no one might say – and tore apart
his empire, piece by piece, year by year. His people, too used to
plenty and safety were slaughtered in their panic. By the time there
was resistance the people were hurt and fractured, and had begun
fighting among themselves as the mad emperor tore them further apart.
He buried his capitol under a cloud of burning ash, laughing.

By
the time he was finally killed, decades later, Darvatius had
shattered civilization across the world. He was impaled on a spear by
a woman whose name and nature have now faded to time. He was alone at
the end. His body was pecked apart by crows, and his bones lost.

The
Empire Today

The
empire of Darvatius does still exist, in the form of the a thousand
bickering claimants holding on the crumbling ruins of the empire’s
third capital, Hispir. The city is a place of bandits and criminals
now, with the Imperial Heirs incapable of even maintaining their own
walls. Entire neighborhoods are swallowed up by anarchy. A fragment
of Darvatius’ throne passes from faction to faction like a ball in
a game.

The
Imperial Tongue

The
imperial language was once universal, but fell into disuse in the
wake of the empire’s collapse. The development of the more
easily-learnt Babel reduced it further to a dead language, fit only
for dusty histories and wizards’ spellbooks. It is now mostly
spoken by the Hispirians, scholars, and lawyers.

The
Truth

Darvatius became a god. He died at the battle of Fendol Kaj, as all
the histories agree, but at that moment a god was born. Ninety years
he had carved the world in his image, and now the world responded in
kind. This was not a proper apotheosis, nor was there continuity of
identity, but that matters little. Man makes gods, and this was the
one that sprung unbidden from the mind of humanity.

He sits now in Hell. He has stolen back his soul, his body, his legions, and all manner of demons are held under his hobnailed boot. He waits to march again.